Raimmy's blog

Upgrade Nextcloud in Docker

Jun 01, 20243 min read

So, here I am, hours after having started to upgrade Nextcloud. Seems easy, isn’t it ?

Well, it seemed easy at first, I do agree.

See part (*) of the situation on the github project from commit c6c775d and onwards.

Pre-disaster situation

The first important thing to note is that you have to upgrade Nextcloud one major version to the next one, and only the next one. Starting from Nextcloud 25, I aimed to reach Nextcloud 29, so that’s 4 upgrades in a row.

(*) : I worked directly on prod without committing in order to “gain” time.

My docker-compose.yml file looked like this :

version: "3.7"
 
services:
  mariadb:
    image: mariadb:10
    ...
 
  nextcloud: 
    image: nextcloud:25
    ...

Starting good…

Everything went well until Nextcloud 27 included (except I got a version is obsolete warning for some reason I didn’t investigate at the time - turns out it was simply because version: "x.y" in docker compose file was deprecated), and then, upgrade to Nextcloud 28 as there was a statistics table to alter in the database. I didn’t want to get my hands dirty, then I told myself : time to upgrade MariaDB.

… into somehow a mess…

What a terrible idea. Obviously it broke. Nextcloud couldn’t even connect to the database anymore. In fact, MariaDB’s version (11) wasn’t supported. But I didn’t realized that and I was working both in prod and in local, sometimes git pushing to prod. That’s were I really messed up, as I anticipated in local and pushed the docker compose file with nextcloud:29 .

It tried to upgrade with Nextcloud 29. From there, when I was trying with Nextcloud 27 or 28, it said 29 was installed and I couldn’t downgrade. But when trying with 29, it said that 27 was installed and I couldn’t skip a major version. So I was kinda stuck.

Indeed, according to config.php , the server version was 27. But according to version.php , it was now 29. I deleted the latter - and at last realized that MariaDB’s version wasn’t supported, so went back to mariadb:10. Then, I faced various issues with tables definitions in the database, but all were solved by adding MARIADB_AUTO_UPGRADE=1 .

… unresolved mysteries left behind

So I was back with a clean Nextcloud 27 installation. Everything was fine… except I couldn’t see a single file in the web browser view. I tried to scan files again, rebuild tree, repair… everything seemed useless.

So eventually, I’d make up my mind and try to upgrade to Nextcloud 28. And it worked. Hurrah.

Solved using

mariadb:
  image: mariadb:10
  ...
  environment:
    ...
    - "MARIADB_AUTO_UPGRADE=1"

Info

Delete version.php when conflicting with config.php .

Info

Using php occ maintenance:repair and php occ files:scan --all a lot.

Good luck with your upgrade.

References